With bad news after bad news when it comes to consumer rights in relation to software and copyright, it's always refreshing to see that there are still people in high places who aren't yet bought by big content. Late last week, a major battle was won for consumer rights in Switzerland: Switzerland's Federal Supreme Court has ruled that IP addresses are personal information, and therefore, fall under the country's strict privacy laws, and may not be used by anti-piracy companies.

As I point out in my previous comment, this really go back to the secret files scandal. Let's run your privacy test in this context. If I'm going to a left-wing political meeting, someone can follow me and see to what address I'm going (it's happening on the streets, which are public). If they follow all the guys going to the meeting, they might figure out a meeting actually takes place by using only public information. Yet, when you build a secret files about someone that includes all his participation in social activities for some years, I can assure the guy won't be happy about it. And it happened to thousand of swiss citizen.

You can basically collect almost everything someone is doing (you have to use the streets to go to a bar, to a friend, to the doctor, whatever) by just following the person in public places. Yet, building a file containing all this informations is fucking scary from the person's point of view. Really, I know a lot of people that were subject to the secret file stuff and they were definitely shocked.

An important point of the swiss law regarding personnal data is that if you collect personnal data or data that could lead to the identification of a person, that person should be informed about it.

I think collecting one public information about a person at a given time is no problem, but putting together hundreds of public informations about a person can become a problem.